Therapy can release old wounds, but can it bring you fully alive? Psychiatrist-turned-retreat-leader Dieter Middleston Scheid and his partner Baccha Schwartz describe their immersive silent retreats in Italy, where open sensory attention, slow-motion movement, and ten days without speech help participants rediscover a wordless inner home.
Most people fear looking inward, but Armand DiMele argues that introspection is a joyful act, not a search for flaws. He walks through how the brain works, why the unconscious drives so much behavior, and why dropping self-criticism and blame is the prerequisite for genuine self-knowledge.
Fear is not just a feeling but a hardwired survival circuit, and the brain acts on danger before the conscious mind even knows what is happening. Neuroscientist Dr. Joe Ledoux walks Armand through the amygdala’s two pathways, why emotional memories feel vivid but are often inaccurate, and why it is far easier for emotions to hijack thought than the other way around.
Can a Buddhist mindset survive inside a financial newsroom? Former Bloomberg News anchor Carmen Roberts joins Armand DiMele and Dr. Sherry Siegel, M.D. to explore how insatiable desire drives both personal unhappiness and Wall Street excess, and how compassion and higher consciousness can redirect that drive.
Waking up is not just physical. Armand DiMele argues that most people drift through jobs, marriages, and daily life in a kind of waking sleep, and that irritability, numbness, and drug use are often just attempts to stay unconscious. Callers explore what it takes to finally show up for their own lives.
What do parties, hunger, sex, and manipulation have in common? They all hijack the primitive brain. Armand DiMele argues that the real work of being human is learning to honor instinct and intellect together, rather than letting either one run the show.
Are you in control of your mind, or is your mind controlling you? Armand DiMele and Dr. Bernard Starr, PhD, Psychologist, trace how chemistry, conditioning, and automatic thought patterns quietly drive behavior, then explore whether meditation, introspection, and spiritual detachment can help us step back and truly observe our own thinking.
Growing old is feared more than death itself, and that fear may be largely a cultural illusion. Armand DiMele and Dr. Bernard Starr examine how longevity has reshaped society, why research shows older people are often more satisfied than expected, and how a shift in ego and time-consciousness can make aging a genuine liberation.
Can we truly escape the identity built from our experiences, or are we prisoners of our own ego? Armand DiMele reunites with Dr. Bernard Starr, PhD, Psychologist, to trace the arc from 1970s feeling therapies and primal work to spiritual psychology and the limits of both approaches when it comes to genuine transformation.
Wakefulness is not the opposite of sleep but a spectrum of its own. Armand DiMele surveys the science of staying alert, from circadian rhythms and brain waves to caffeine and cortisol, then connects it all to how people like the chronically sleepy, the manic, and the depressed actually move through the world.
